Zadignose's Reviews > Tomb for Boris Davidovich

In this excellent novel, author Danilo Kiš takes the reader on a tour of an early 20th Century European Hell. This Europe is akin to a bubbling, simmering cauldron in which institutional ideology and cynicism are blended in equal measure. What's cooking? An all you can eat buffet of atrocity. Who are the guests? Idealists and pragmatists alike. You too; you're invited.

The collection of stories that constitute this novel don't intersect much, except thematically. Characters that make a cameo in one story may take center stage in another. But we get all sorts, and so we can sympathize with and/or revile each in turn.

There is certainly variety among the characters and tales. Bravery and cowardice both show their face, though brave suffering tends to get more attention. One odd thing in my reaction to the stories, for me, is that the title story "A Tomb for Boris Davidovich" was perhaps the story that least affected me, perhaps because it has more of a grand mythical "hero" (those are ironic quotes) at its center. It's still very good, but somehow, taken alone, I didn't feel so much for this one as the other stories around it. More impactful for me, in fact, was the companion story that followed it, which the author claims to be a translation of a historical account from the 14th century, though I haven't confirmed whether that's actually the case. Anyway, those two stories together are more profound for their parallelism.

This book can and probably should be enjoyed as a companion piece to Vollmann's Europe Central. There are so many similarities between them that it would be a challenge to catalogue them all... I won't bother with the details now. But where Vollmann is verbose, Kiš is laconic. Vollmann's work gets much of its power by cumulative effect. Kiš's gets it from vignettes punctuated by the occasional knife-thrust. But really, I could almost imagine that some of these chapters were a parallel narrative that could have been inserted between chapters in Vollmann's work, and they'd mesh pretty damn well.

Another good option would be to make a tetralogy out of A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, Europe Central, Darkness at Noon, and This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen. Then you'll have a quite bleak outlook on the world. What brings these books together is that they're not histrionic. They have some real horror in them, but they don't emote for the reader. They present. The emotional reaction is up to you, if you're inclined to have one. They all can be opaque with regards to authorial intent. They also each employ some form of ironic distancing, yet seem to profit from it in terms of overall impact. The books are insidious. They get into you.

They don't blend quite so smoothly with Céline's works, which are more madcap, harried, and bluntly traumatizing, but Celine's got a whole lot of books to give you that other perspective on madness and horror, if you're in the mood. That's a recommendation, by the way.